The author makes no effort to explain why AI :isn’t: a commodity as Apple and Amazon says. I was looking forward to that. I think the article is weak for not defending its premise. Everything else is fluff.
Readit Newsamgreg commented on Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile gmays.com/the-biggest-bet... · Posted by u/gmays
I've been doing frontend development for over 10 years, and obviously it's anecdotal but I never heard anyone use the Closure Compiler outside of ClojureScript, and I imagine that in practice most people doing frontend development are using Webpack, Vite, Parcel, etc. The idea of really small bundles sounds nice, but in practice because the advanced optimizations require manual tweaking in many cases to get it to work (externs) it's something few people would want to deal with and the small bundle size improvement isn't worth it compared to the standard tools like UglifyJS/Terser.
There may be other reasons, but I assume the main reason that the Closure Compiler was chosen for ClojureScript was because it's Java based, so it was straightforward to get working. Moving away from it now would be a huge breaking change, so it's unlikely to happen in the official compiler anytime soon or ever. I think the only way it would actually happen is if an alternative like Cherry got enough traction and people moved to using mainly the alternative.
Yeah nowadays I think non-ClojureScript people use it mostly for legacy reasons or the aggressive minification. Back in the day, aside from the pre-ES5 conveniences I mentioned surrounding inheritance and module bundling, it was also a way for developers to do some basic type enforcement (via JSDoc annotations that the Compiler would check). TypeScript essentially rendered that obsolete.
See: https://effectivetypescript.com/2023/09/27/closure-compiler/
Ahh right. Yes I am in fact conflating the two.
But can the compiler be used without the library? Or can the library be used without the compiler/would it still be beneficial?
Yes and yes; in the past, prior to ECMAScript providing first-class inheritance, module ex/imports etc, the Library supplied methods to achieve these in development, and the Compiler would identify these cases and perform the appropriate prototype chaining, bundling, etc. See, eg, goog.provide
For the most part, I would guess people still use the Closure Compiler because of its aggressive minification or for legacy reasons. I think both are probably true for ClojureScript, as well as the fact that the Compiler is Java-based so it has a Java API that (I am guessing here) made it easier to bootstrap on top of the JVM Clojure tooling / prior art.
While the level of commitment to backwards compatibility is commendable, I had hoped this would trigger dropping GCL instead of forking it.
My surface level understanding is that GCL is a big reason why 3rd party libraries are a huge pain to use in Clojurescript.
Of course this would have went completely against the project’s goals, so it was never going to happen.
I think you are conflating the Closure Library with the Closure Compiler. They are related but not identical. The Compiler, I think, is what makes it difficult to use externs; its “advanced optimizations” can and often does break libraries that weren’t written with the Compiler’s quirks in mind. But advanced optimizations is an option; if you don’t need aggressive minification, function body inlining, etc. you can opt out.
Shadow CLJS has made working with external libraries quite easy and IIRC it lets you set the compilation options for your libraries declaratively.
amgreg commented on Microsoft Fails to Support MS SQL Server for Django github.com/microsoft/mssq... · Posted by u/spapas82
Why would one choose MS SQL nowadays? I am curious, why did the author choose it?
amgreg commented on Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)? · Posted by u/SamCoding
If you’re on a Mac or iOS you could try creating a Shortcut where you input Markdown, convert to rich text, then output as a PDF. I use Shortcuts regularly. It’s pretty easy to set up. I haven’t tried it on something as larger as 500 pages, though. YMMV
It doesn't. Inference is still expensive, and demand for it is high, as evidenced by Anthropic's frequent "we're out of quota" messages and Deepseek's crap-out under load last night. On the training side right now only the top flight labs can conduct serious, ambitious research, and even they don't do as much research as they'd like. Witness Meta effectively train the exact same architecture on similar data mixtures for the past couple of years. More or less the same situation is happening across the board - compute bandwidth (and therefore the ability to experiment) is scarce. What this means is inference will remain quite expensive in the foreseeable future, especially multimodal and long-context inference. Believe it or not, even Google is compute constrained. When I was there some days I couldn't even get a handful of TPUs to do my job - everything was allocated to training Gemini. Even if it gets a lot cheaper to train models, you could just train larger, more capable models and do more architectural / efficiency research, and iterate faster, with tremendous payback in the long run. NVIDIA is the only viable seller of shovels for this gold rush for everyone but Google and Anthropic. Bypassing the gatekeepers, and making capable AI models available to more people makes their product more valuable.
> NVIDIA is the only viable seller of shovels for this gold rush for everyone but Google and Anthropic.
Why do you except Google and Anthropic?
amgreg commented on Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009) paulgraham.com/twitter.ht... · Posted by u/Olshansky
I hate to be blandly negative, but this deserves (deserved?) it. This is dumb. Message boards had this property, as did blogs. There is nothing meaningful in this short essay.
Edit: if you think message boards and blogs were too specific, here are a couple of other media with this property: radio and television.
I think the OP is posting this in the context of the other front-page discussion of the Bluesky protocol. I think in this context it is interesting.
amgreg commented on Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912? onepercentrule.substack.c... · Posted by u/Gaishan
"eneeavor" "kalsomining" "dodr" "Decline I."
Is this AI-generated? It certainly has all the signs of being so.
I've read real books from the late 19th and early 20th century, and while occasional typos do appear, their density here is suspicious.
Thus my conclusion is that I don't think this is a real 8th grade test.
“Decline I” is an instruction for the student to provide the first person pronoun in all cases: I (nominative), me (accusative/dative/ablative), my (genitive), mine (genitive substantive). (I have borrowed the case names from Latin, with which I am more familiar. I think the English cases are nominative, objective, possessive.)
I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
amgreg commented on Supreme Court overturns 40-year-old "Chevron deference" doctrine axios.com/2024/06/28/supr... · Posted by u/wumeow
>Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with the position of supreme court to push the responsibility of lawmaking back on congress.
It would literally be impossible for congress to make a law covering every single nuance agencies are tasked with. This Supreme Court knows it. This is nothing more than deregulation on a scale not seen in modern American history. When you can’t find clean drinking water in 30 years, this will be why.
This case is about whose interpretation gets to fill in the gaps.
The statute (APA) requires courts to form an independent judgment about the gaps.
The Chevron doctrine required courts in certain cases to set this judgment aside in favor of an agency’s judgment—-basically on the basis that the agencies are closer to the problems and know better.
This setting aside may be the better outcome, however it is not explicitly specified in the statute (APA).
Ultimately, if Congress wants this to be the case, they /can/ amend the statute (APA), effectively enshrining the Chevron doctrine.
At the end of the day, the court’s decision here rests on statutory interpretation (not constitutional doctrine) so Congress could change the outcome by amending the statute (APA) to explicitly codify Chevron. This would be achieved with its ordinary legislative power (Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution).
The court’s decision does effectively put the ball back in Congress’ court.